KoboldCpp
one portable binary, no install, and an agpl licence that obliges you to share modifications you host.
genuinely open with the strictest obligations here — the copyleft cuts against companies rather than users, which is the opposite of everyone else's catch.
it ships as a single dependency-free executable bundling a server and the kobold lite web ui. no installer, no runtime, no package manager — download and run. for a category where setup friction is the main barrier, that is a real design achievement.
the feature set leans towards long-form fiction and roleplay: memory, world info, instruct and chat modes, all built around keeping a long narrative coherent rather than answering one-off questions. cuda, rocm, vulkan and cpu via its own llama.cpp fork.
the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.
- category
- local llm tools
- pricing
- free
- website
- github.com
genuinely open with the strictest obligations here — the copyleft cuts against companies rather than users, which is the opposite of everyone else's catch.
we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.